MALS 290 Borders & Boundaries: Race, Gender, and the Human

This course will focus on the question of erecting, crossing, and/or transcending borders and boundaries in relation to race, gender, and the human. Thus, it will critically address and theorize the more recent tendency to shift and cross normative borders in a way that runs counter to the constraints implied in traditional models of gender and race. In terms of gender, it will emphasize the contemporary fluidity of concepts of masculinity and femininity, deconstruction of hierarchical gender models, as well as the growing debate around transgender issues in texts, among others, by Judith Butler. In terms of race, it will address the paradigm’s contested definitions and boundaries, and the current debate on its social implications. It will discuss the issues of exclusion and inclusion, the third space, post-colonialism and the ideology and policy of race/racism by focusing, among others, on creative non/fictional narratives as well as theoretical texts by Frantz Fanon and W.E. DuBois. As a third angle on questioning borders, it will explore the aspect of the human - both in and beyond its relation to race, gender, and the concurrent effect of dehumanization - in texts by Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida on human and civil rights, crimes against humanity, sovereign power vs. bare life, and man in relation to animal.